What I’ve Been Doing

Next Monday is the first of September, and soon after that it will be Autumn, and then Winter, and then we’ll lie lethargically in bed all day long until we lose the will to prop ourselves up even for breakfast or afternoon tea and we’ll wither away into nothingness and that’ll be the end of it. This concerns me.

– I don’t think I’ve ever been so, you know, melodramatic about the winding down of summer. I have to keep thinking of nice things on the horizon to keep my spirits up. Going to Duluth in a couple of weeks’ time. Traveling to Frankfurt in October (for the book fair, which I’m less keen about than the trip over-all). Um. Well, that’s all.
– I walked by a house in the Seward neighbourhood yesterday that had a nice chicken coop and enclosed ‘run’. I’m thinking of going to a community ed ‘class’ on Chickens in the City in October. I don’t have any grand chicken plans, really, but I’m very interested to know how one keeps a small number of feathery friends outdoors during Minnesota winters.
– Not surprisingly, working from home has left me with very few articles of clothing appropriate for the Frankfurt book fair, so I used $100 of garage sale earnings to buy a few things the other day. I found some nice things, but $100 doesn’t go very far in regular shops. I could easily spend multiple hundreds in H&M alone.
– I made grape jelly and rhubarb jam on Sunday. The grapes came from my mom’s yard (supplemented with a few wild ones), but their juice was only enough for half the box of Sure-Jell. I made up the entire thing and stirred the rest into rhubarb compote I had frozen. Both set up perfectly, and they taste great. I used the reduced sugar version of Sure-Jell, meaning I dissolved it with 2.5 cups of sugar instead of, like, five. I can’t imagine having to use that much more sugar! The grape jelly is plenty sweet just as it is (and I didn’t add any sugar to the juice beforehand).
– Here’s something not very nice. Ignore all the schmutz on the porch floor and try instead to find the spider in this picture. You can just see its legs sticking out of the dark hole in the middle of the image. It seems to live in there. I’ve only seen it out and about once, and when I got up to, uh, take care of it, it scrambled back and forth quicker than any spider has ever moved before disappearing into the hole. Now when I eat my breakfast, I see it poke its legs out, and if I move, it sees me and pops back inside. Since there’s nothing I can do about it, I’ve decided to have an uneasy truce with him. I was going to call him Bert, but since ‘Bertie’ is already reserved on my ‘real pets’ name list, I’ll have to come up with something else. Hank.
– I went to Ikea to get Super Cheap white sheets for the basement ceiling (I thought this was a common practice, but in case you’ve never seen it, I’m planning to staple the sheets to the beams to clean it up without having to finish it off with plasterboard.). I also came home with a 59 cent spatula, a silverware caddy for my dish drainer (it’s already revolutionized my life!), and three of their 29 cent mugs, shown above. The lack of a handle isn’t really much of a problem, and they’re the perfect size. I continue to have suspicions as to how anything can possibly be that cheap, but still. Wow!